December 7, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Making Cameos By Sadie Stein Not a good gift. There was this shop in the neighborhood where I’d sometimes go. It was a good spot to find inexpensive gifts: small vases, lacquered boxes, a decorative dish where you could leave your spare change—noncommittal things just north of impersonal. I’d have gone there more, but for the saleslady. She was sour. I mean, really puckered—the sort of acerbic person whose life needs an injection of sunshine from a Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or an Anne of Green Gables or a Pollyanna. The requisite plucky orphan never seems to have come into her life. The first time I visited her shop, there were some other customers there. “Can I buy these individually?” one asked her. “No, just as a set,” she said curtly. After the shoppers left, she turned to me. “Can you believe what assholes people are?” she demanded balefully. “This is what I deal with all day.” Read More
December 7, 2015 Prison Lit Extreme Remedies By Max Nelson George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, forty years later. George Jackson Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on the French revolutionary Madame Roland, here. On August 21, 1971, George Jackson pulled a pistol on his wardens at San Quentin, the notoriously racist maximum-security prison to which he’d recently been relocated. When the news broke that he’d freed several of his fellow inmates, presided over the slashing of eight prison officials’ throats (six guards and two trustees), and then died under heavy gunfire while sprinting to freedom, it provoked a strange mixture of shock, anger, revulsion, and grief. Gregory Armstrong, Jackson’s editor at Bantam, would later confess to a reporter how relieved he was that he hadn’t followed through on his offer to help the younger man escape. Bob Dylan wrote a protest song in Jackson’s praise. (“He wouldn’t take shit from no one / He wouldn’t bow down or kneel / Authorities they hated him / Because he was just too real.”) Jackson’s attorney, Stephen Bingham, under suspicion of having smuggled in the escape weapon, fled the country for thirteen years. Huey Newton gave Jackson a long, effusive eulogy (“he lived the life that we must praise”). A group of Black Panthers imprisoned in Folsom advised his parents to “take pride in the fact that you have a large strong family of budding warriors.” Since the 1970 publication of Soledad Brother, his ferocious, disquieting collection of letters from prison, Jackson had been an international celebrity. In his introduction to the book’s first printing, Jean Genet insisted that the collection “must be read as a manifesto, as a tract, as a call to rebellion, since it is that first of all.” Abdellatif Laâbi read the letters admiringly during his own imprisonment; they let “one follow,” he told his wife in 1975, “the transformation of a man who challenges a new kind of slavery, strips its mechanisms down, and keeps his dignity intact throughout the worst kind of ordeal.” The day before Jackson’s death in 1971, Derrida wrote Genet a long letter worrying that the introduction hadn’t done justice to the dire situation Jackson’s writing was meant to expose. “With the best intentions in the world,” he cautioned, “with the most sincere moral indignation in the face of what, in effect, remains unbearable and inadmissible, one could then lock up again that which one says one wants to liberate.” Read More
December 7, 2015 Contests Can You Name These Writers? By Stephen Hiltner Update: The winning responses were announced on December 9. “Paris Review,” by Anthony Russo. (Click to enlarge.) Here at The Paris Review’s offices, we’re often uncovering oddities from our archive: our “Twenty Year Index,” content from our very first Web site, festschrifts from bygone anniversaries. Last week, though, we discovered something entirely different: an illustration by Anthony Russo depicting a Paris Review office chock-full of literary heavyweights. And we’ve decided to have some fun with it. If you can correctly identify all eleven writers in Mr. Russo’s illustration, we’ll give you a free one-year subscription to The Paris Review—along with a copy of our new anthology, The Unprofessionals. Just send an e-mail with the names and their accompanying numbers to [email protected]; the first three correct lists will win. Good luck—and have fun! Stephen Hiltner is the senior editor of The Paris Review. You can find him online on Instagram and Twitter.
December 7, 2015 Bulletin Aesop and The Paris Review By The Paris Review A concentrated treatment to reinvigorate intellect and imagination. How to Use Read attentively from cover to cover at least once; repeat as desired. For best results, pair with a responsible intake of red wine. Ingredients Erudition, insouciance, concision, onomatopoeia, allegory, exposition, allusion, anastrophe, synecdoche, metaphor, ekphrasis, irony, verisimilitude, euphony, assonance, litotes, caesurae, alliteration, metonymy. What to Expect Aroma: ink, paper Product texture: smooth, substantial Feel: stimulated, transported We recommend pairing this stimulating read with application of a facial cleansing masque. Read More
December 7, 2015 On the Shelf You and Your Fantastic Hopes, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Kurt Vonnegut with his wife Jane and their three children, Mark, Edie, and Nanette, in 1955. Photo: Edie Vonnegut Our new Winter issue, out now, features an interview with Gordon Lish, the editor whose drastic emendation of Raymond Carver’s work remains contentious even now, decades after the fact. In an excerpt of the interview in the Guardian, Lish talks about his reasoning with Carver: “I saw in Carver’s pieces something I could fuck around with. There was a prospect there, certainly. The germ of the thing, in Ray’s stuff, was revealed in the catalogue of his experience. It had that promise in it, something I could fool with and make something new-seeming … But Carver’s were not the only ones I’d worked on to that extent. Not the only ones by a long shot. There were many. I’ve been decried for a heinous act. Was it that? Me, I think I made something enduring. For its being durable, and, in many instances, beautiful.” Subscribe now to read the whole interview. Kobe Bryant’s versified retirement announcement is only the latest example (and, if we’re being honest with ourselves, not an especially sublime one) of the sports poem, a venerated form whose proponents include Randall Jarrell (“Say Goodbye to Big Daddy”) William Carlos Williams (“The Crowd at the Ball Game”) and Marianne Moore (“Baseball and Writing”). But how to tell which is the most accomplished of all time? With a March Madness–style tournament, of course, conducted by Daily contributor Adrienne Raphel: “In honor of Bryant, I’ve pitted sixteen sports poems against one another—with both ‘sports’ and ‘poems’ arbitrarily defined … to determine which sports poem should be crowned victorious. The four regions: Basketball, Baseball, Football, and Running.” Zadie Smith argued in 2008 that literature was too dominated by lyrical realism. In a new interview with The White Review, she refines her thinking: “The fashionable argument against ‘realism’ has become a bit simple-minded … In fact I think we are rather sophisticated in our understanding of the limits and illusions of language, and that this is again largely due to our familiarity with the literary uses of language in everyday life. When you hear, for example, two girls at a bus stop and one is telling the other a ‘story’—‘and she was like … and I was like … and they were like’—the storytelling girl is not doing this because she imagines that with this act of mimesis, with this ‘realistic’ re-telling, she has fooled her listener into believing that what she is presenting is ‘authentic’ or an unvarnished truth, in some sense essentially ‘real’—no. She is performing a speech act in which both parties understand, at least to some degree, that what is happening is a form of ‘performance’, a bracketed and partial reality. The problem with the argument that all realism is naïve is that it assigns to both parties in the literary exchange—the reader and the writer—an almost childlike innocence in the face of literary artifice.” Kurt Vonnegut’s wife Jane played a critical role in her husband’s career—it was she who convinced him that he should write at all. “Many of the ideas and themes that characterize Vonnegut were born in the conversation between Kurt and Jane, and throughout his career she remained a voice in the text … Her faith sometimes baffled him. ‘I can only hope, and this on your instigation, that I’ve not reached my full stature,’ he wrote. ‘I’m willing to work like a dog to attain it.’ And he did … ‘I don’t want to let you and your fantastic hopes down with a thump.’ ” Did you know? This thing called Art Basel happened in Miami: a bunch of overblown parties that may or may not have been art-related. Kaitlin Phillips was there, watching the arrivistes: “Christopher Bollen playful-seriously accused all artists of the Dunning-Kruger effect, ‘a psychological term for people who highly exaggerate their skill sets. I feel like all artists have to be sufferers of it. What you are trying to achieve, like, outweighs even your own experience of what it is’ … Aesthetically, I’m more willing to diagnose the suits from last night with Dunning-Kruger; the men without so much as a Wikipedia entry, or even a personality, let alone charisma or looks, god forbid politesse, trying to talk their way into clubs. But I’m being morbid. ‘What is your criteria? I just want to learn,’ said a man, angrily. ‘There’s no criteria,’ said the doorman, a real cool customer. And there were women too: ‘You don’t understand the culture,’ lisped (or rasped) a thickly beautiful woman in a thick Italian accent. ‘You don’t understand the culture.’ Neither, apparently, did she, not that I don’t sympathize with the trials of a chunky-junky-jewelry woman. It’s a postlapsarian scene, baby—you can’t just walk in on the Louboutins you never learned to walk in.”
December 4, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Cuppy, Cloverleaves, Captain Cunt By The Paris Review Illustration by Ed Nofziger, from How to Attract the Wombat, by Will Cuppy. Lovers of dictionaries and nature can rejoice in John Stilgoe’s new book, What Is Landscape? Stilgoe, who holds the enviable title of Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at Harvard, wanders the etymology of the landscape lexicon, from the ancient Hebrew word kittor (meaning a stream of water, but also a pillar of smoke) to the difference between a cart path and a cow path. He manages here, as in other of his books, to abut the old and the new, the outmoded and the contemporary in such a way that the differences are plain but the connections between them are still vital—in the way, say, a plowed field abuts a brushy fence line and the beach abuts both the sea and the edge of human civilization. These are marginal spaces, constructed spaces, spaces “easily taken for granted, all too easily half seen.” His examination of highway cloverleafs is particularly good. Though not villages in any sense, they nonetheless provide the basic commercial services of one, and he links them fluidly to their counterparts in the past: “Especially in rural and wilderness areas, the ‘sparsely settled regions’ that slightly unnerve urban and suburban travelers, every cloverleaf might be the isolated tavern or inn of European and British folktale.” —Nicole Rudick On Nicole’s recommendation, I’ve been reading The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, the Griffin Poetry Prize–winning collection by August Kleinzahler. It’s as good as she says. I’m drawn to poems that revel in their own grit—ones that knead sex and death and deadpan humor in with the erudite and the literary; in Strange Hours, such moments come in delectable little bursts. In a poem to the philosopher Aristippus there’s a “Captain Cunt of the Roaring Forties”; in another, a young woman is chewed out for her unflattering exposé of an ex-lover: “ … Mark, who kissed and indulged you, opened his heart, / only to have you pick up your pen to write / about his belligerent penis …” Kleinzahler takes us to the natatorium, the marketplace, the Oxford River; he introduces us to Calliope and Erato and Lewis Bernard Castel; and all the while he muses on the peculiar hours we keep to eat, to fuck, to pass the time. And yet, my favorite lines are far tenderer. They’re from “After Lady Murakami”: “Just as I found myself / in the dentist chair / only yesterday / hands clenched against my thighs / so I find myself here / in this seat / heart in my throat / as you walk into the room.” —Caitlin Youngquist Read More